Figured I’d take a break from the otherwise depressing news coming out of the rest of the world, and turn to the mundane yet still entertaining wealth of energy contained in the form of my 13-month old son Leo.

Recently, he has taken to walking (and even running a bit, although the short spurts he manages might not qualify as a true run yet) in the space of three weeks. Which of course means that nothing within his reach (110cm or nearly 4 feet off the floor) is safe from his curious, shredding hands. Leo is tall for his age, standing about 79cm (about 31in), - and fast too: he can clear off anything on my desktop short of the laptops and the monitor if I step out of my den to fresh my coffee. Oh, and need I mention that he is figuring out how to move things (such as tipping the giant Lego tower over on its side) to extend his reach?

Naturally, this makes me momentarily regret having been a tad greedy and getting the nicer, bigger desk at our last trip down to IKEA (”well, I need the space more than you, and besides, I have the fax and printer taking up space too…”) whilst Mrs. Seeker has had to contend with her smaller, but slightly taller and out of reach (for now) computer desk.

Leo’s favourite television show is SHIMAJIRŌ, which is sort of a Japanese version of “Barney the Dinosaur”, a TV show for kids starring the eponymous tiger cub. When he gets to be very cranky (such as the 40 or so minutes before supper, or near his nap time), the dozen or so episodes we have acquired through either friends, yards sales of returning Japanese expatriates, or bought on eBay seem to do the trick.

We keep a tape a SHIMAJIRŌ videocassette in the VCR (which is about its sole redeeming value these days) in the living room, for quick anti-crankiness deployment. And now, he has learned how to start and stop the VCR player as well as turn on the TV (although this may be more the convergence of the TV being on whilst he is poking around with the VCR). What a way to surprise me while I sit here surfing the web and half-watching Hardball on MSNBC.

And a good way to spend time with my little boy before putting him to bed.

I was going to use this space for a rather lengthy rant about radical Islamism… but something much better came along.

12 Sept. 2006

Baby Leo

Welcome to the world, my little one. 

And so, we (my wife and I) are agreed on a name for our upcoming boy:

Ryouma Joseph: 龍馬

(the Kanji are for "Ryouma" if you can see Japanese text in your browser; if not, you might see some funky "garbage" text).

It’s pronounced "Lee-OH’-ma"*… but it shortens nicely to "Leo" to all his future American classmates who might be otherwise inclined to club him down like a baby harp seal for having such an unusual name.

More details on this later… I had a nice post all ready for this, but then my OS got cranky when I switched to Japanese input, and dumped the edit page off into oblivion. 

*In Japanese, what we see phoneticized into a letter "R" is actually pronounced closer to an "L", but not exactly like an "L". It is probably closest to the soft, single "r" found in Spanish words like pero.